Florida Should Provide Funding To Help Drug-addicted Babies

No Florida legislator has stepped forward to sponsor the idea, but a pilot project aimed at protecting babies born addicted to cocaine and other drugs should be included in the next state budget.

The idea was proposed by the Children`s Consortium, a group of Broward County child advocacy organizations, after the director of Broward General Hospital`s neonatal intensive care unit revealed that four out of five premature children at the hospital are born to parents considered potential child abusers. In many of these cases, the children are born addicted to drugs or physically impaired because their mothers abused drugs or alcohol during pregnancy.

Unfortunately, the state`s child welfare agency does not consider these infants to be abused or neglected children. The Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services prohibits child welfare workers from following up cases of ``cocaine babies.`` Instead, the cases are referred to the local Health Department, which does not have enough nurses to pursue the cases and does not have employees trained to detect child abuse.

The first change, then, should be to rewrite state law so that infants are classified as abused if they are born with physical or mental problems because their mothers abused drugs or alcohol. Massachusetts has such a law, and Colorado also requires that drug-dependent infants be treated as abused children. A state advisory panel to HRS already has suggested such a change.

The proposed pilot program would require $430,000 and would place the project in Fort Lauderdale, where the problem of cocaine babies has been well documented. One-third of the money would be used to set up a five-person team to provide counseling and health services to the baby and family and two- thirds would be used to set up more residential drug treatment beds for the mothers.

This program for cocaine babies is only one of many changes that should be mandated by the Legislature this spring in HRS child welfare programs. The troubled social service agency is due for massive review, changes and an infusion of new state funds to correct chronic failures in management and philosophy.

The proposal should not be lost, however, amid the legislative tussles that undoubtedly accompany efforts to improve existing programs. The problem of cocaine babies is relatively new and getting worse. It needs to be addressed quickly.